


Tiny Monsters

by linaerys



Category: Dexter - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-31
Updated: 2007-07-31
Packaged: 2017-10-21 07:55:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/222791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linaerys/pseuds/linaerys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><b>Request:</b> When left alone with Dexter following the apocalypse, someone begins to suspect he’s not what they thought he was.<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	Tiny Monsters

Did he think about this before it happened, imagine the pure and absolute silence of a dead world? The disease that killed most of them, all of them, was too perfect, enough to make Dexter believe in a benevolent God, a God made not in man's image, but in Dexter's. It dries them up, as thoroughly as Rudy-Brian's flash freezing ever did, although seeing the bodies leaves him cold--any intelligence that designed this is so far beyond Dexter's as to be indistinguishable from random chance.

Strange coincidence: Deb is still alive. They share no genetic similarities beyond those they also share with some of the dead: white skin, brown hair. The cynical outlook of a cop’s child is learned, not bred. Harry gave that to both of them.

Deb finds their new world fitting, and she tells Dexter about it, a laugh like a whistle-in-the-dark when she says, "Now I don't have to worry about being single." Dexter doesn't follow up on that, even though he knows Deb wants him to. It's them against the world, and Deb likes it that way.

She wheedles Dexter into a trip on his boat. To where, they leave unspoken. Dexter steers along the coast, slowly through the Gulf. They stop where they need to and raid abandoned grocery stores, stepping over human bodies like dry wood. The faces are mummies like something out of Ancient Egypt. Ancient dead.

Deb catches him staring in a 7-11 in a town outside New Orleans, and hits him on the shoulder. "Hey, Dex, snap out of it." She looks around. "They creep me out too."

They don't creep Dexter out. They don't do anything to him at all except make him wonder if he and Deb are the only ones left, what kind of strange Creator's logic would leave the two of them as Adam and Eve in their new world. It's too sick even for the God in whom Dexter has never believed.

Harry had religion, Job's religion--the inevitability of suffering, the eventual vindication of the righteous man. When Jesus asked him to love the sinner, maybe Harry said, "Okay, one sinner. My son. I'll love him." Not that he was cruel, but Harry was more comfortable with punishment and reward than turn-the-other-cheek love.

On the boat, he takes nights and Deb takes days. She looks at him strangely again when she wakes in the morning to see him smiling into the sunrise.

“Don’t you think about it?” she asks. “Everyone is gone.” Dexter’s learned not to answer questions for which he has none, and he gives Deb that blank look she hates. “Rita’s fucking gone,” she adds, probably hoping to provoke him into some reaction.

Yes. Soft, sweet, dead Rita. She succumbed quickly, and the children. They leave a gap in his life, next to the one that held his job, his apartment, his hobby, a life full of gaps. Dexter is used to gaps.

“Of course I miss her,” he snaps. Let Deb think his coldness is masking a deeper pain. It’s worked so far.

They pull ashore for more supplies in Corpus Christi. They brave the tide of bodies and pull up to the dock. In the water the bodies don’t look bloodless anymore as saltwater infuses their tissues. Deb chokes back her gag reflex, and Dexter drives the boat around them. He doesn’t want to be cleaning human flesh out of the motor later.

The cinderblock wall of a substation a hundred yards back from the dock has the imprint of a shattered skull on it, a few strands of hair still clinging, long and blonde with dark roots. Woman’s hair.

Deb covers her mouth, cat eyes wide and scared above her hand. Dexter starts to speak and she holds up her other hand for quiet. Above the slush of the waves against the concrete wharf, Dexter can hear a high keening wail. They follow the sound behind the substation and see a dark-haired woman cradling the blonde with the cracked skull to her chest.

Deb pulls out her gun—Dexter likes to see that: a little paranoia is going to be good for her, now more than ever. “Step away from the injured woman, ma’am,” says Deb, voice pitched low, steady, forceful cop-speak. The woman cries louder.

Deb gestures at him with her eyes and her chin, _Help me._ Dexter kneels down next to the crying woman, and pulls her arms away, lays the dead or dying woman down on the pavement. The women are tethered together at the ankle with handcuffs cinched tight enough to dig into the flesh. Bruises both fresh and healing bloom on their faces.

The woman throws her arms around Dexter. The tears and sweat on her face wet his neck and his shirt as Deb squats next to the injured woman.

“Shhh,” says Dexter until the woman clinging to him stops crying. “What happened?”

“He raped me, and he killed her. He says he’s coming back.”

“Deb,” says Dexter.

She takes over, or her cop training does. “Tell me what happened.” Her voice is even.

“He said he’d come back for us. He—.” She gulps down air like she’s drowning and Deb strokes her hair to calm her.

“We’ll keep you safe,” says Deb. “Is he holding anyone else?”

“No.”

“Where was he keeping you?” Dexter asks. Too forceful—Deb looks up at him and glares.

The woman swallows hard and her eyes fill with tears again. “On a boat.”

“Which one?” The woman shakes her head. Dexter doesn’t even say anything before he turns and goes back to his boat, to the cache of guns and knives on board. He and Deb discussed that they’d need protection in a new world without rules; neither argued about that. Deb will have extra clips in the pockets of her jacket.

Dexter brings her another gun, twin to the Beretta she already has with her, and helps the women into a defensible position in corner made by the joining of two houses. The injured woman isn’t breathing, and the other woman’s panic is clearly half due to being tethered to the dead weight of the other woman’s body.

“Dex, I’m the cop. You’re just—.”

“That’s why you should protect them.” She’s so much the cop she’s used to taking orders and she swallows down her argument and nods. Later, they’ll argue, Dexter’s sure.

Somewhere in the marina is a man who thought that all that was left in the world was him and the women he found to abuse. He’s killed one or close enough it makes no difference, and he’ll likely kill others. It would be good enough for Harry, especially now when the cops aren’t coming, now that they’ll never come.

It’s not hard to pick out the man’s boat—it’s idling where all the others are still. Dexter climbs on board. It’s got two stories, two bathrooms. The lower bathroom is full of the filth of human captivity: blood on the floor, a backed up and leaking toilet, a set of handcuffs hanging open off a towel rack. Scores and gouges in the metal bear witness to past struggles here.

Dexter doesn’t have the tools he would like: no plastic sheeting, none of his favorite paralytic, but he can make this work anyway. His adversary is not a careful man, and he won’t be expecting an attack. Dexter crouches just beyond in the bottom hold. It smells foul, but he’s been in worse places. He breathes through his nose, and resists the urge to pat himself for his tools: the plastic restraints, the knives. They’re where they should be, and nervousness (says Harry) is one of many things that will get him killed.

The captor is almost a caricature when Dexter sees him, silhouetted in the light coming in the hatch. He walks to the galley refrigerator and starts loading it with beer from his bags. He’s most vulnerable when he’s still standing with one hand holding the bag, so that’s when Dexter takes him, pinning one arm behind his back and joining it to the other when he drops the groceries.

The man sets up yelling and Dexter runs his head into the front of the refrigerator enough to stun him. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, the lie they always want to believe.

He pushes the man down to the floor and secures his legs before the man regains enough composure to think about running or screaming. Pressure on his throat keeps the man from making too much noise, but gives him enough air to answer questions. Dexter wishes he’d brought gloves.

“You have girls here, correct? You killed one?”

“Hey, I ain’t sharing. And she tried to run.”

Dexter smiles, his mild, bland smile that Doakes hates. Hated. He saw it in the mirror when he was learning how. It _is_ creepy.

What does he usually say to them? This is different now, less controlled but headier—he can deviate from the script. He has his confession, all he needs for the code, to be secure that he is once again a weapon in Harry’s hands. Now it’s his turn to play.

He puts a piece of duct tape over the man’s mouth and starts to cut.

***

He hears Deb before he sees her—light footsteps on the deck and then, “Dex . . .?”

“Stay back, Deb.”

“Are you alright? We heard him come by here?”

“Where’s the girl?”

“Sharon? She’s back where you left us.”

“You left her?” Dexter scans the area for something to throw over the body, quells the urge to step back when the pool of blood inches toward his feet. “Don’t come down here.” Sheet on the bed, that’ll do. He tugs it off the bed with the hand that isn’t hand stuck with dried blood to the knife, and covers the body. “I’m coming up.”

He turns and sees her, too far down the stairs to have missed at least seeing some of what Dexter did. He should leave the knife, but that habit, no prints, no evidence, sticks it to his hand as much as the tacky blood. Deb laughs, nervous and mirthless. “He put up a fight, huh?”

“Something like that.”

He doesn’t want to look at her with eyes fresh from the feasting of the Dark Passenger. People always see too much or too little in him.

Deb sees too much. It’s why she’ll be a good cop some day. “He’s not the first man you’ve killed, is he?” She sounds betrayed, and if her biggest worry is what Dexter shared, then he’s in better shape than he thought.

Dexter doesn’t answer. She grabs his arm. “Tell me.” Younger sister bullying, ask once, ask twice; she’ll ask until she gets what she wants. Or until he scares her away for good.

“Later.”

Sharon is where Deb left her, huddled as much as she can with her leg still fixed to the injured woman’s. Deb leans down, feels her pulse, and shakes her head. “We should have done something.”

“Do you have a key?” Dexter asks.

Deb shakes her head. “They’re not standard cuffs. He probably got them from a porn—.” She cuts herself off guiltily.

Dexter sighs. “You’re not going to want to see this.” Deb’s eyes get big when Dexter points at the dead woman’s ankle with the tip of his knife. He left his saw on the boat—it couldn’t be tucked anywhere convenient on his body and he didn’t want to answer the questions it would raise. He sighs. Cutting bone with a straight blade is a bitch.

He cuts through flesh with his knife, but has to break her ankle bone with a rock to it. The wet crunch of the bone breaking makes Deb gag again. She and Sharon’s faces are turned away from him, toward each other. Dexter pulls the dead woman and her foot out of view. They support Sharon as she limps to Dexter’s boat.

Deb helps Sharon into the shower and dresses the worst of her wounds, then puts her to bed. She marches back up on deck with a determined rhythm, stamping her obstinacy into each step. He isn’t surprised when she puts a firm hand on his shoulder and says, “This is later, Dex. We have to talk about it.”

Why do people always think that things need to be talked about? Harry understood that talking couldn’t fix some things, maybe it couldn’t fix anything. Some things stayed broken, and you used them the best way you could. If he tells Deb anything, a lie, will it be better or worse than what she is already imagining?

“How do you think Rudy died, Deb?” he asks. “I don’t want to talk about it.” He puts some anger he doesn’t feel into those last words, and glances at her to see if he’s selling it. Her mouth is slightly open, gazing at him, but it’s not fear he sees on her face.

“I don’t care,” she says. She wipes away the tears from her eyes, but her voice is steady. “I’m glad you did it.” Brian or the nameless man on the boat, does it matter? “If I could only choose one person to survive, it would be you, Dexter.”

He looks at her, remembers her scared eyes when Rudy— _Brian_ handed him the knife. Brian could have offered him a different choice: an anonymous, innocent woman, and Dexter thinks then he would have shared, clasped bloody (bloodless?) hands with his perfect mate. But not Deb. Maybe that’s love.

“You too, Deb. I mean it.” It’s the time to smile, to echo the curve of Debs lips through her tears, but Dexter doesn’t. “Take care of your girl. I think there’ll be others.”

Deb nods and wipes her nose on the back of her hand. Dexter doesn’t chide her for that; it’s one of a thousand things that don’t matter anymore. “We’ll protect them?” she asks.

Now Dexter smiles. “Yes, we will.”


End file.
